Selling in England, buying in Scotland…

Can't see why not although your offer would obviously be seen as less attractive because of the chain.

Are bridging loans still a thing? Alternatively you may be better off just organising a new mortgage on the Scottish purchase and paying off early (or invest the spare cash for bigger return).

I don't think you can do that in Scotland - you are committed to the sale early on in the process and have to have the funds available.  Friends of mine who saw a house they wanted did as above and took a bridging loan, which lead to some nervous months and they had to sell their house.  It is a seller's market up here at the moment with stuff getting snapped up fast.  I would suggest you have a chat with and appoint a solicitor (all via lawyers here) and get an expert view.

Have you got enough equity in your house to remortgage and release £100000? That'll make you a cash buyer and able to move fast when buying. You'll just have a heftier mortgage until you sell. Should be a much better rate than a bridging loan.

We were in the lucky position to have cash to buy our house when we moved to Scotland then sell our house in England later.
However some friends remortgaged their house in England to raise the cash to buy their new house in Scotland.
They said it worked out cheaper for them that way rather than getting a bridging loan.
Not sure of the details though other than they decided they wanted to move and around a month later were in the new place.

would it be feasible for a seller in Scotland to accept an offer if I were to offer a £200k deposit on a £300k house with the proviso that I need to sell my property in England first before I can hand over the final settlement and take the keys or is it ludicrous to think any seller in their right mind would even humour the idea?

For the seller this isn't any different from being in a regular chain in that you need to sell before they get their money. I certainly wouldn't consider an offer like that any different to any other offer from someone with a property to sell.

Have you considered renting until you sell then buying? That's a pain but it would put you in the strongest position.

I did the England > Scotland move a few years ago - tbh it isn't much of a problem as the two systems have the basic problem that no one will commit to anything until their own sale is confirmed. So selling in England to buy in Scotland isn't much more of a barrier really.

In Scotland, the sale becomes legally binding when the missives are signed which can in theory by done quite early in the process. However, if you're selling a house to fund the purchase you won't do this until that sale is confirmed by the missives being signed or if in England contracts being exchanged. So just like exchanging contracts in England this gets pushed later and later and close to the moving date.

The main difference in Scotland is that all the offers are made through a solicitor and it's a bit more formal in that respect. The seller also has to pay for the survey which means you have more info when you make your offer. These differences should, in theory, weed out some of the time wasters but the basic issue remains is that someone can spin it out for months and pull out consequence free.

We moved within the Highlands recently and quite a few sellers were not even accepting viewings from people with a property to sell. As others have said, its a seller's market here.

Not a sellers market everywhere. Do your market research in the are you are looking, Highlands covers quite a bit.

Having said that when we moved from England we were in rented and I doubt we would have got this house if we had a chain.

Its great fun.

I've barely had more fun in my entire life.  I still have nightmares about it!

My advice is get a good solicitor who has done a lot of Scottish/English deals.

https://www.rankinaitken.co.uk/ ask for derek.  He did Terrahawk from here. And mine and a couple of family members.

Pm me if you want a chat.

I don’t think you can do that in Scotland – you are committed to the sale early on in the process

Not as much as people would have you believe.

@duncancallum has called out the key issue IMHO, which is to find a solicitor that has conveyancing experience in England and Scotland.

I moved England to Scotland about 20 years ago.

We moved into a rental for 6 months while we looked for a purchase and sold our property in England.

Made things much simpler.

Not sure what role the deposit would play in this. Is it non-refundable? What would happen if you changed your mind/couldn’t sell your house. What would be in it for the seller?

I moved England to Scotland about 20 years ago.

We moved into a rental for 6 months while we looked for a purchase and sold our property in England.

Made things much simpler.

There isn't a functioning rental market these days in much of Scotland, not really the option it once was unless you're lucky. Due to changes to tenancy regs, general high demand and the rise of air bnb.

We did it about a year ago (though with a smallish mortgage). Where we’ve moved to has no rental properties so that wasn’t an option. We had to move in to the area in time for the start of the school year as well which just added a bit more stress!

We instructed the estate agent selling our property that our priority was to find a small/no chain buyer even if we gave up a bit of value. We found one, they also had a kid so had similar dates in mind so taking all of that to negotiation with our seller made things a bit easier as they could see we were all motivated to get on with it. No chance of buying if you haven’t got an offer accepted on your own property imo (not really any different to parts of England in that respect though).

But also our seller had already moved and was selling an empty house.

So yeah, it is possible, if you have the right buyer and the right seller. Good advice to find a solicitor that has done it before. Also, not sure if it’s still the same where you are looking but we budgeted to go 20% over asking, and ended up needing all of that to secure the purchase.

btw they move fast with sales up here, so you have to be on it. I didn’t even see our house in real life until a week before we moved in! Luckily I like it 😅

No chance of buying if you haven’t got an offer accepted on your own property imo

This is it really, houses are selling if priced right. If not they can sit around indefinitely. The differences between the 2 countries are small in reality.

I don’t think you can do that in Scotland – you are committed to the sale early on in the process

Not as much as people would have you believe.

+1

We moved back to Scotland from the South East just 2 weeks ago, so some of the pain is still quite fresh! We didn't want to rent again as we did that when we first moved South (plus we had to get into the catchment area straight away). To avoid (as much as possible) the potentially tricky part of selling in England and buying in Scotland we looked at some new build projects with release dates that coincided with our vague moving date. We were using the logic that moving to Scotland was the hard part, so get ourselves up here with a house we can reserve as ours, then in time think about moving again to our 'proper' house, as this would be the 'easy' part.

In the end we went for something that had been on for 6 months, already vacant, with no other competition, so it was a relatively straightforward chain. It needs a bit of upgrading - nothing major -  but for most normal people you can get more for your money elsewhere in the city, hence lack of interest. For us it's nirvana (up Kinnoull Hill for those that know Perth). Anyway, battling against others for a house when your a few hundred miles away and against a different set of property laws is something we were keen to avoid.

We had it in our offer letter that our offer was subject to the sale of our house in England, but the buyer's solicitor wouldn't accept this. We were really lucky in that we sold quickly to someone who had be guzumped twice and was keen to proceed quickly to keep the chain alive, so this wasn't an issue.

Hopefully this is of some use. Good luck to you and I hope it all works out!

I moved up to Scotland last year from England.  I sold, rented (albeit with family) and then bought. It meant I was a cash buyer which swung it for the house I was buying even though my offer wasn't the highest. Overall it saved a lot of stress.

One thing I did notice is I had a very good local village estate agent selling down south who were not the cheapest but managed the sale very effectively. At any time I knew I could phone them and they knew exactly who was waiting for what. In Scotland once the sale was agreed it the sellers estate agent stepped back and were surprised when i asked questions on progress. It was left to the two solicitors to manage things and it wasnt quite so transparent and smooth. In the end I contacted the seller and between us we managed both solicitors.  I would do this much sooner if I was doing this again.

I dont regret the move. The quality of life is so much better up here. Good luck with the move!

Thanks all for the advice. I guess my idea with having a chunk of cash to wave around a bit is that it might demonstrate an absolute commitment to buy as a hefty deposit (possibly two thirds of the asking price of the house). We are also aiming to buy something really off the beaten path that we probably wrongly thought would be harder to sell. Inconvenience in terms of where we live is not something we are worried about.

We are terrified at the prospect of such a big move from the east midlands to Scotland, particularly with a very shy 8 year old who has poor self confidence and the prospect of moving him to a very different primary school. But it’s come out of a result of adoring Scotland and never wanting to leave when we go there every year, a better quality of life for all of us and losing both of my parents at a relatively young age (67) within just 12 months of one another last year and them never really getting chance to do what they wanted to do before they died which in their case was a desire to move to Wales.

Sorry to hear that OP

Hoping to move up there one day so bookmarked

They’re great reasons to move. Remember then when it starts to feel difficult and once you’re living the dream you'll wonder what all the fuss was about.

By far the hardest bit was not knowing if our daughter would settle in school ok, but she once again proved that we worry too much. Ours was 8 when we moved as well, we figured the closer we got to secondary school the harder it would be for her, it’s a great age to make the move.

Best of luck with it all 🙂

My daughter was 11 when we moved, it has been very positive for her. No regrets 🙂